Toshiba Agrees to Purchase Assets of OCZ

Just last week, we reported that OCZ was filing for bankruptcy after it failed to comply with its loan agreement with Hercules Technology Growth Capital. At the same time, Toshiba also signaled its intent to purchase OCZ's assets.

Now, however, Toshiba has confirmed its agreement with OCZ and will indeed "acquire substantially all the assets of OCZ Technology’s SSD business". All that is left is for the bankruptcy court supervising OCZ to approve the deal. Toshiba expects the deal to go through and the acquisition to be completed next month.

Mr. Seiichi Mori, Vice President of Toshiba’s Semiconductor and Storage Company and Corporate Vice President of Toshiba, said:

“We are excited to participate in this opportunity. If our bid is successful, the combination of our leading NAND technology with OCZ’s SSD expertise will allow us to further strengthen Toshiba’s SSD business. We value OCZ’s SSD business and technology in both the consumer and enterprise markets, and we are confident that it will reinforce our capabilities and help us to secure leadership in the SSD market.”

In response, OCZ's CEO Ralph Schmitt also said:

“OCZ looks forward to becoming part of Toshiba, a world leader in flash memory and storage solutions. Toshiba brings the necessary capital and NAND flash supply and expertise, which together with our leading edge solid state drive technology will enable us to provide client and enterprise customers with a very compelling total storage solution. This combination will make for an unstoppable force in the highly competitive SSD market.”

This looks to be a promising union as Toshiba is one of the leading manufacturers of SSD NAND - its Toggle-Mode NAND is used in many top SSDs such as Corsair and SanDisk. On the other hand, OCZ's Indilinx Barefoot 3 is a promising new controller that is one of the quickest in the market.